Even his hair looked defeated. Limp. It hung on him in its way, the brown strands overly worked with hair gel.
He looked incredibly tired for a thirty-year-old.
We’re changing that. Starting with this. We can do this. We saved, we scrimped, and now we’ll succeed.
Popping the radio back on, Felix pulled out into the alleyway.
“Tonight, we have a guest speaker from our new leader’s cabinet. Please wel—”
Felix cursed as he jammed the brakes. A superhero in a costume stumbled out in front of him from a side alley.
The van clipped the caped crusader and sent him spinning.
At the same instant, another costumed weirdo appeared. That person pounced on the hero as they stumbled back from the van and began plunging a knife into their chest over and over.
Felix kept his eyes straight on the road and hit the gas again.
“Didn’t see anything. Didn’t see a super being murdered. Nope, not a thing,” Felix said, staring straight ahead.
The closest Felix had been to crime was watching the loan shark across the street from his work operate.
Even that felt too close for comfort sometimes.
Ever since the supers in charge of the city’s defense had lost, it’d become open season. Anyone not in line with the new power structure was free game.
Which was pretty much every and any superhero out there. There’d been a mass exodus and only a few had remained. And of those who remained, the vast majority were poor slobs who thought that they could tough it out till relief came.
In fact, a lot of people said the relief had come at the same time as the original attack.
Which made sense; no one else ever came.
Felix doubted anyone else would come at this point.
For people like Felix, the everyday man, life hadn’t changed much from the turnover.
Vice laws, like slavery, prostitution, and drugs, were legalized. They were now given government protection, and were expected to meet the same or similar regulations that other markets had.
And let’s not forget taxes.
Taxes were of course levied on all those vices. Being legal, the price had rapidly inflated, crashed, then flatlined. The city raked in the cash and started immediately spending it back on city programs.
Like drug rehabilitation centers.
Then Skipper, the villain now in charge, had promptly lowered income taxes. Since there were no federal taxes anymore, that meant people overall were paying significantly less, unless they were partaking of the new legal frivolities.
Which set off another round of vice spending and purchasing in general.
Suddenly, not only were the heroes not receiving support, but if anything, they were being asked to leave.
Or hunted and killed.
“—to be here, Mike! I’d like to start off by reminding everyone we have a ten-grand reward for anyone with information leading to the capture of a hero. Five grand for a kill with the body as proof.”
Or hunted, apparently.
The audience cheered at that reminder. Felix had heard something about that but had brushed it off as rumors. Apparently, it wasn’t.
“As our government is only here in this city, we need to secure ourselves. The longer we have threats inside, the longer it takes us to begin to branch outward,” said the guest.
“I heard that one of the first cities we’ll be taking is—”
“Now, now, Mike. You know I can’t talk about that. Though speaking of targets, I’d like to warn our listeners out there: Violence towards the other humanoid races, such as Dwarves, Beastkin, or anything other than a Human, won’t be tolerated. It’ll be punished. Severely.”
“No arguments here! Glad to hear justice will be applied evenly.
“I heard the old federal government isn’t even bothering us anymore. That they’ve left the recapture of our city to the Guild of Heroes. Is that true?”
“It is, it is. Skipper is regularly on patrol and watching for anything. So far, they haven’t retaken an inch.”
Tired of the political whitewash he was sure was going on, Felix flipped the radio to an eighties station and drove onward.
Shutting the door with a thump, Felix looked around the spacious garage. Much like every other area in this house, it had the feel of his family. It was their house, after all. He was merely living here as the clock ticked down on them being proclaimed dead. Death in absentia.
They were at year seven of ten.
His aunt and uncle had simply up and left one night when Felix was twenty-three. Give or take a few months.
Leaving him alone in a home that had been paid off completely. Their bank accounts, stock, and everything else was being managed by a group of lawyers through a trust.
He had rights in the trust to insure they weren’t spending money frivolously, but he had no rights to the money itself.
Sighing, Felix moved around to the rear of the van.
“This’ll change everything. Once I get this squared away,” Felix said to himself, opening the rear doors. “Then I can quit. Quit that hellhole of a job and just… just do whatever. Yeah. Whatever.
“Sit around, pick my nose, and watch game shows all day.”
Felix grabbed the edge of the rectangular box and heaved once. It slid out by a foot.
It was at this moment that he realized he had no way to get it from the bed of the van to the garage floor.
A quick hunt of the garage got him the motorcycle ramp his uncle owned.
Wedging it against the van, and getting it in a stable place, he heaved on the crate again.
Groaning, it slid free of the van, hit the motorcycle ramp, and slid down it.
Wood cracked and popped when it hit the floor. It managed to come to a stop the same moment it came off the ramp.
Felix sighed and closed the van doors and put the ramp back.
Getting a hold of the latch at the top and bottom of the box, he took a slow breath, then unbolted them at the same time and tipped the lid backwards.
Looking inside eagerly, Felix felt dumbstruck.
Instead of a load of bismuth, which he’d hoped to turn into gold with his own superpower, there was a corpse.
The face looked like it’d gone through a factory furnace. Like something out of those old slasher films his uncle loved.
There were no eyes. Dry, empty sockets gaped at him. There were no ears, but instead two nubs of flesh no bigger than the tip of his pinky. Two gaping holes sat in the middle of the ruined face, right where a nose would be. Should have been. No lips remained to cover the broken and shattered teeth.
It was a real horror show.
“No more,” mumbled the not-corpse almost like a mantra. “No more, no more, no more, no more, no more.”
Felix looked down at the ruined husk of what had once been a human being and pressed his hands to his face. This wasn’t something his brain could comprehend right now.
“No more,” the body whispered.
His brain slowly lurched into gear and a thought sent him for the passenger door. Popping open the door, he grabbed the paperwork and started to read over it.
Paperwork was on the rise as of late since the taxmen had to collect taxes. And taxes needed accurate paperwork.
National ID cards, too.
Finally, he found the listed items sold. No mention of bismuth came up at all.
Only the purchase of a slave and one slave control box. One superheroine, to be specific. One previously owned by the government.
That’s a woman? Holy crap.
Felix felt his thoughts starting to spiral rapidly out of control. Hunching over, he put his head between his knees and took some deep breaths. Right when the world stopped spinning crazily, he stood back up and breathed more regularly.
Setting the paperwork down back next to the Pit, he considered his options.
His money was already spent and gone; even though he’d clearly received the wrong package, it wouldn’t be good for him to whine about it. They’d just laugh at him and ask him what the problem was. He’d accepted the bill of goods as it was. Who was to say this wasn’t exactly what he wanted?